PositiveThe Last MagazineNo gripping plot drives Lacey’s story, which subverts both the road novel, that staple of the literary old boys’ club, and the journey narrative—there isn’t much of a transformation at the end. Instead, what we have is a young woman’s paranoiac mind in search of something we may call a \'self,\' or perhaps a complete emptying of that self ... What makes Lacey’s novel more powerful and unsettling than the mere ramblings of a privileged white woman going through a quarter-life crisis is its unmistakably subversive tone. Elyria may be irritating and unreliable at times, as most interesting narrators usually are, and her travels may lead her back to the beginning, but she is still defying authority and a society that has pigeonholed her into the roles she has to play ... Lacey has written a melancholy and very funny novel in a serpentine and supple prose that can take a seemingly cliché phrase like \'my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to\' and manipulate it until it is utterly strange. By the end of the journey, the reader is disoriented enough to notice, like Elyria does, \'how the earth and everything on it is ever and ever shaking, all the time.\'
